I thought it was longer than it
had been since my most recent Rake’s
Progress. When I checked, I discovered that had only been a couple of years
or so ago, at
the Royal Academy: and very good it was too. Nevertheless, this new Aix
production from Simon McBurney proves mightily refreshing. It has something in
common with the RAM staging (John Ramster) in that it concentrated on the opera
as an opera, rather than the debates surrounding it – although those can surely
never be far away from most of our experience, whatever Stravinsky, with
typical disingenuousness, might have suggested. But the emphasis and the
illumination are different, which is surely just as it should be.

London stands at the heart of
this Rake. Not, thank God, in a
particularist sort of way: that would be especially absurd for a staging in
Provence. This is not only the city of Hogarth, but also the city that was, for
all its flaws, indeed in many ways on account of them, until recently the
greatest in the world. It destroyed itself in part, of course; ‘its’ greed,
both in the eighteenth century and under neoliberalism, rightly provokes
revulsion, none greater than that of those who live or have lived there and are
not members of the ‘banking community’ and other such delightful trades. But
for those of us estranged from our country at the moment, Theresa May’s ‘citizens
of nowhere’, we know who really did it. We are also able to recognise our city
with all the delicious agony of an exile, internal or external, in what we see
before us, without collapse into the merely didactic. For the great, indeed
diabolical con trick that is capitalism, whether neoliberal or in an early
mutation, is in large part the parable here; it always was, whatever Stravinsky
or even Auden might have told us. (Repeat after me. Intention is not
everything; sometimes it is very little at all.) When Tom goes to London, he
goes to the City; he goes to one of those plush, joyless, ‘pleasurable’ towers,
from which one may see other towers. He has well-dressed, superficially attractive
– very attractive – people fawn over him, change his clothes, transform him
into one of them. He is – and this would hit home as strongly as I have ever
known it do – ‘weak’, as Ann tells us. Christina Cunningham’s costumes are a
profoundly important – and knowingly shallow – contributor to the drama; they
make us envious, even complicit, wishing or at least in danger of wishing we
were part of the tragedy we know this pleasure garden to be.

Nick, Tom, and images of Baba

When Mother Goose’s
establishment comes into view, the emphasis shifts to eroticism that is both
blatant and subtle. Again, most of us probably want it, although we know we
should not. A subtle orgy might seem a contradiction in terms, at least to
those of us on the outside of this world, but Leah Hausman’s choreography
really does its work here. Far more is suggested than actually depicted; our
minds, our imaginations are made to do the dirty work. Pornography, the
pornography of late capitalism, is thus dramatised and accused. I could not
help but think of Antonio Negri’s Constitution
of Time. In all the pleasure, the beauty of the young bodies, there is of
course neutralisation too. Everything becomes the same; it does not matter whom
one chooses, whom one adds to one’s iPhone collection. And so, after Tom has
taken his pictures – displayed to the world, as they would be, although in this
case on the walls of the set – of his final nubile companion of the evening,
Nick Shadow, the capitalist Devil himself, shows him pictures of Baba the Turk.
The rest you know – save for the twist here that Baba is now played by a
counter-tenor. Her whole life is performance, an act, of course, and this takes
its place in her line of publicity strategies. There is no especial jolt to our
– or at least to my – understanding; that, I suspect, is part of the point. The
auction is full of typical metropolitan ‘style’, that of the empty, expensive
sort in which the drama has been mired all along: Mayfair, not Whitechapel.

On the other side, however, Ann
seems, and I think probably is, more present than ever. She sometimes, earlier
on, walks past. Tom appears to see her, but does he? And would what that even
mean if he did? She is good, a symbol of goodness, but she is not just that; I
felt her more as a character than I can remember doing so before. That is
partly a matter of Julia Bullock’s tremendous performance, touchingly pure, and
with every word readily audible (far from always the case in this role). But it
is partly McBurney’s conception too. She is, perhaps, a social critic too, no
mere inegénue. There is indeed, as McBurney suggests in a brief programme
interview, ‘dans une certaine mesure une figure révolutionnaire’ to be
perceived there too. Baba knows that, it seems. She has her own roles to play,
but she is convinced by Ann, and actually sends her on her way to attempt,
however vainly, redemption.

Ann Trulove (Julia Bullock) with auction guests behind

Before that, moreover, Ann
walks through a typical Tube subway, cleverly conjured up with design
technology: a bit of that South Kensington pedestrian tunnel to it, actually,
although more ‘desolate’, ‘poorer’, to the non-London, or con-comprehending,
eye. That actually means more alive, of course; the homeless people and the
busker – playing solo trumpet, in a nice touch – are, for us Londoners, for us
human beings, the real story, the real tragedy. And in a final, potentially Foucouldian
twist, the man running the show in Bedlam is Nick Shadow’s shadow. Madness has
of course always been a way to deal with criticism. Had Tom perhaps an inkling
of what was going on; or might, at the very least, Ann have helped him
enlighten him had he not fallen ‘mad’? The voices in his head are the voices we
hear all around us: ‘unelectable’, ‘sensible’, ‘moderate’, and so forth? They
are the voices that will do all they can to prevent us make London, not what it
was, but what it should have been, could have been, all along – and in many
ways still is.

I almost – almost – believed,
then, in the ‘love story’ that comes almost sentimentally to the foreground of
work and production alike. Bullock played her part in that, of course. So did
Paul Appleby’s lovable, lovably weak Tom: the sort of character one knows one
should distrust, and yet desperately wishes to do otherwise. He never seemed
quite the author of his own actions; which amongst us is, whilst Nick is at
play? More than that, though, his sappy tenor proved just as sympathetic and
manipulative as Bullock’s crystal-clear soprano. Kyle Ketelsen’s Nick was every
bit as persuasive as he should be – and more so. He was reassuringly ‘normal’, ‘as
things are’, until one really looked and listened: just like capital itself,
and with all the dangerous, often surprisingly understated, attraction it
exerts. Evan Hughes proved an excellent shadow to the shadow: the same, and yet different. A more real ‘normality’ was offered by David Pittsinger’s splendidly
sane Trulove; or is Trulove just a better actor, the voice of old-school conservatism?
Hilary Summers made for a fantastic Mother Goose: ruler of her own world, not
least vocally, and with a splendidly naughty sense of genuine fun. Is she not a
‘revolutionary’ in her way, too? Or are we just meant to think so? Andrew Watts
made much of Baba’s staginess; how could he not? But there was definitely a
human heart beating strongly there; the appeal to her fans is far from entirely
to be dismissed. Alan Oke’s Sellem imparted a fine sense of slightly camp
insidiousness: all the better to sell Tom’s goods with.

The graveyard scene

There was a ruthless dryness to
much, not all, of Eivind Gullberg Jensen’s conducting which was not only echt neo-classical Stravinsky, but very
much of the dramatic idea. The orchestra, both unlike and not unlike Wagner,
was telling us something. A delight in contrivance, moreover, fused perfectly
with the score’s well-nigh miraculous forging of continuity out of what ‘should’
merely stop and start. Stravinsky’s cellular method here is, in many ways, not
so very different either from his late serial masterpieces or, dare I suggest
it, The Rite of Spring. The miracle
is his – and, in a way, that of capital too. If the Orchestre de Paris had its
soloistic moments and was for the most part commendably sharp of rhythm. If
there was certainly nothing wrong with its performance, though, there was perhaps
a slight lack of presence, even of commitment, that slightly detracted from the
musico-dramatic whole. Maybe it was as much an acoustical matter as anything
else: outdoor performances, notoriously, take a good deal of getting used to. There
was certainly no such fault to be found with the singers of English Voices, all
of whom played their individually directed performances to a tee. They, like
the rest of us, were both enthralled and ultimately destroyed by the game
afoot.